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Broad researcher profile

This past October, we announced that Paul Blainey, an expert in single-molecule and single-cell approaches, would be joining the Broad as a core faculty member in early 2012. He will join us after completing postdoctoral research at Stanford University in the laboratory of Stephen Quake, where he has pioneered novel methods to perform single-cell microbial sequencing. As part of this work, he designed a 3.5-cm microfluidic chip that sorts single cells and amplifies their genomes to prepare for sequencing.

After completing graduate school, computational scientist Miriah Meyer noticed a disappointing trend in data visualization. “Our field is usually about generalities,” she says. “We create algorithms or systems that are very general for some broad class of problems or types of data.” But Miriah saw that these solutions, especially those for the analysis of biological data, often didn’t help answer the specific questions of scientists using them.

Cells use a complex network of connections to make a constant array of decisions about their surrounding environment: Is it time to grow? Is it time to change into a different type of cell? When a cellular component or connection is missing or defective, disease takes hold.

Researchers at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, a part of the Broad Institute, are taking on two common but complex psychiatric diseases – bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Among the Stanley Center investigators is Jon Madison, a group leader within the Center whose work involves digging into the genetic contributions to both disorders.

As a post-doctoral researcher in Harvard Medical School investigator (and Broad Associate Member) Norbert Perrimon's lab, Serena Silver loved talking to her fellow post-docs about their projects and liked to help them come up with new ideas to try. Now, as Group Leader of RNAi Screening Projects at the Broad, Serena gets to talk to researchers about their projects for a living.

Here on the blog last month we introduced you to the roundworm C. elegans, a scientific star among worms. At the Broad, a team of scientists led by computational biologist Carolina Wahlby is now helping C. elegans take center stage with new tools for high-throughput analysis of worm images.

A common thread stitches together Nick Patterson’s numerous careers: deep and joyful thinking about mathematics. He has cracked Cold War codes and run numbers on Wall Street. Now a computational biologist in the Broad’s Program in Medical and Population Genetics, he has helped colleagues analyze the migration and mixing of human populations. His work has spanned epochs and analyzed the population history of an entire subcontinent.

Kiran Musunuru, a clinical and research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and research affiliate at the Broad Institute, has received the Broad’s Lawrence H. Summers Fellowship for research for 2010-2011.

The year-long fellowship, named after former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, gives scientists an opportunity to advance their research at the Broad. Kiran intends to deepen his research into the causes of heart attacks, as well as the role that genetics plays in regulating levels of cholesterol and triglycerides in the blood.